Karen Skærbæk: Laying the strategic foundations, creating wow-effect and building a digital workplace for the future; new intranet in Arla Foods

For the past ten years Karen has been working with the global intranet and collaboration tools in Arla Foods. During this time both the purpose of the intranet and the technique behind it have changed a lot. For years, Arla Foods was stuck in an outdated SAP intranet, but in the Spring of 2015 a new and dramatically different intranet was launched. See the intranet and hear the story.

Until now we have had a close look at Arla and what we do. Let’s look at 6 key facts about Arla.

Today more than 12,700 farmers own Arla and they supply more than 13 billion kilo milk a year which makes Arla the 5th largest dairy company in the world when it comes to milk intake.

The more than 19,000 colleagues ensures that our healthy and natural products are produced, distributed and sold in more than 100 countries worldwide and that the yearly revenue reaches 10 billion euro.

But where are all the colleagues located in the world?

I am here today to talk about a project called One Portal – a classic replace the old intranet with SharePoint-project, but still a project that stands out at least in Arla for being a rather succesful project.

So how did we come about that.

The project started out about 1½ years ago and the primary driver for the project was really a new infrastructure strategy that had Microsoft as target platform instead of the previous IBM and SAP platforms.

Us working with the old intranet really didn’t care. Everything was better than our starting point.

SAP Netweaver portal – I am not going to say a lot about that – except for don’t to it!!

In many ways it was an ok intranet in the classical sense. It was business critical as it contained several important self service solutions that the users needed such as invoice handling and absense reporting. But it was heavy and time consuming to maintain it so content was outdated, elementary things such as search constantly failed, the platform was heavy and slow, unstabil and uncharming – in short – it had lived out is time. It was time to move on.

So a preanalysis was kicked off to investigate what Arla’s new intranet should deliver. And this is the result.

As a part of selling the idea of the new intranet to the management and business stakeholders the deliverables of the project was broken down to areas of improvements and KPIs that directly matched Arla’s top objectives and strategy.

We actually grand this strategic house a big part of our success. It was a strong communication tool, but also an important prioritization tool in the project. When we were in doubt about a decision or had a disagreement in the group we considered these business objectives and that usually helped us move along.

Besides these the steerco also had a list of demands and two important requirements they added to the list was WAU effect and mobile first.

They weren’t very specific in their definition of either of the two so that was up to us in the project to define them. This was of course challenging – especially with mobile first. Because what does that really mean and what are the consequences of the different paths you can take here. But that is another presentation that I will not cover today.

Wau Effect we interpreted as the importance of design. We had to come up with something entirely new on the design. You will see that later.

But we continued documenting the requirements in the analysis phase so we could move into vendor selection.

Here we focused on a few but important elements

We chose Proactive and TCS and our collaboration with them went very well.

In a scrum project model with 6 sprints of 2 weeks.

After only a couple of weeks we also decided to hire in Valtech to help us with the design part as this turned out to be quite challenging when we needed and wanted WAU effect.

As with all succesful projects we had an for the most part engaged and well founded steerco.

And yes we did have 3 project managers in the project. And no I don’t know, if we did well despite or because of that. But jokes aside – they all did very well and with so many parties involved it was good for us in the project teams to be able to push decisions and discussions regarding prizing, estimates, planning etc to them and focus on buildind an intranet.

The project is divided into 3 deliverables.

The result of our endeavors is CheckIn. But before I move into live demo, I would like to say a little bit about what we came from so you can get an idea of how big a journey we are on.

Front page MWP. Very classical intranet front page. Very heavy and with many links in boxes.

There was little confidence in the intranet . It was very hard to find what you were looking for and the search didn’t work.

Several pages were like this labelled under construction for years. Everywhere was outdate and poor quality content.

So how did we do? Overall the first phase of the project was considered to be a success. And luckily the various measurements and KPIs support this. Indeks for Global news in now 150 compared to June. So 50 % increase on Global News Reach.

12.
13 November
2015
12
THE NAME
Global
(airport
language)
Take
action
Tagline of
CheckIn
Check In
to…
The Arla world
Pick knowledge
Connect with
colleagues
Collaborate
etc…
Refers to
”take
action”
bubbles on
smartphon
e apps
Fits in to
the
”journey”
messaging
platform
Check in and check it out
Check